Photographer yells at subway riders, snaps their reactions

Filmmaker and photographer Benz Thanachart has a unique take on the smartphone revolution. When he left New York and traveled home to Thailand over the summer, he noticed everybody there engrossed in their phones. Like many phone users in the U.S., people there were “always obsessed with the little personal space on their hand,” he says on his web site.

To document his “disoriented” emotions over the situation, he took a series of photos for a project entitled “Smartphone.” For each photo, he boarded a train, shouted a random word or phrase, and snapped a photo of people reacting. Whether it was “Fried egg!” or “Kafka!” people reacted in different ways. One woman managed to even contain her surprise and stay on her phone.

Here are the photos snapped by Thanachart, along with his exclamations: